Choosing Names: Man-Kzin Wars VIII by Larry Niven (novels to read for beginners txt) 📕

minute and try to think of something you might use against them. Something you might have picked up in the last week. Some weakness or maybe some blind spot they have, something they don’t notice. I don’t know . . . Something. Just think before you act.” Tom stared at my bloody hands for a minute. “And put down those glass shards. They’ll just get you killed.”

His suggestion was reasonable. I dropped the pieces of the broken mirror to the floor and thought about what he had just said. There had to be some blind spot in the kzinti’s behavior. Something that I had seen during my nightly sessions reviewing what they had done. An idea tickled the back of my mind while Tom got out his medkit and went to work on my hands.

“First thing we’ve got to do is get out of here,” I said as Tom finished working on my hands. “Find someplace where they’ll have trouble finding us.” I walked past Tom, out of the ’fresher and into my room. “But how do we get past that?” I said motioning to the locked door.

Tom looked at my bloody flight suit. “You’re doing a convincing imitation of a hurt crewmember. I can probably get them to let me take you down to the autodoc. After that,” he paused, “it’ll be up to you.”

A plan had begun to acquire form and substance in my imagination. Maybe not a great plan, but at least it was something. “Then let’s do it,” I answered, before my higher brain functions could kick in and convince me of the insanity of my plan.

Tom went to the door and rapped twice on it. The locked door slid open and Shit Head stared in at us. Tom pantomimed something and pointed at me as I tried to do my best imitation of a person in pain. The kzinti guard stared at me and growled as he removed the communications device from his belt and handed it to Tom. I caught snippets of his conversation with Slave Master, comments about an accident and my needing the attentions of the autodoc if I was going to be ready for tomorrow’s test of our drive system. Tom must have convinced him because more spitting growling sounds came from the communications device and Shit Head motioned us into the corridor.

I made a show of leaning on Tom as we walked in the down spin direction toward the Med-Center. Dead light strips, broken down doors and burn marks on the walls spoke silent volumes about the nature of the kzinti. It didn’t take long before we were passing an emergency equipment locker set into the wall.

This one seemed unused, its door closed and latched, but most importantly—it looked undamaged.

I counted my halting footsteps as we went past it. Turning my head I could see that Shit Head was still a couple of paces behind us. And then with what I hoped was a convincing cry of pain I fell to the floor taking Tom with me. Our kzinti guard couldn’t stop in time, his feet tangling with our rolling bodies—my flailing arms didn’t help his balance—and went tumbling to the floor.

Performing the fastest recovery in medical history, I leapt to my feet and dashed to the emergency equipment locker and twisted open its door. The locker contained a full set of tools for dealing with emergency situations, but nothing had been included for the problem facing us right now. I’d have to improvise.

Shit Head was rising from the floor as I pulled out a three-person vac-raft. This was nothing more than a fabric sphere that was large enough to hold three people in a pressurized environment while they waited for someone else to come and get them. But in its unpressurized condition it was just a limp hunk of Beta cloth fabric. I unzipped the vac-raft and threw it at Shit Head. I got lucky. His arms got entangled in the vac-raft’s open end and multiple hand holds.

His claws tore at the vac-raft and ripped long tears in it as ropes of fabric became entangled with his arms. I looked back into the locker and found a breathing mask with an oxygen bottle. I threw them at Shit Head but he batted them aside, though the reaction made him slip back onto the floor.

The oxygen bottle rolled down the corridor and Tom hurled it back at our guard’s head, which it hit with a satisfying thump. The kzinti lashed out with one free arm, leaving deep gashes in Tom’s chest and sending him tumbling down the corridor.

In a moment Shit Head would be free of the vac-raft. I was pulling out another one when I saw a heavy pry bar that was designed to open sealed doors during power failures. It was over a meter long and had a bulging torqueless ratchet on one end.

Turning back to Shit Head I saw that he was pulling out his communications device. This was not the time to let him call for reinforcements. I grabbed the pry bar and swung it with both hands. It connected with our guard’s arm with a weird snap like glass breaking under water, and the communications device went sliding down the corridor. Tom stepped on it, smashing it into a star of electronic debris.

I tried to bring the pry bar back down on our guard’s head, but he was rising from the floor and coming toward me with his injured arm dangling limply by his side. There wasn’t room to swing the pry bar again so I stabbed at him with it. The impact against his chest knocked the air out of his lungs and almost made me fall backwards. Shit Head swung his good arm against the metal tool and sent it flying out of my hands.

I snatched the weapon I’d dropped, turned and ran, hoping that Shit Head would ignore Tom and follow me. He did.

Running up-spin I could feel my synthetic weight increase slightly as